Gainsight's CRM Update Focuses on Customer Retention

CRM software provider Gainsight has updated its platform with new capabilities that it says will enable companies to increase retention revenue by better serving their largest and most strategic customers.

Such customers are important because they account for so much of a company's revenue, writes Puja Ramani, Gainsight's newly-hired director of Product Management and Analytics, in a blog post. Ramani cites a Gartner study that found that 80 percent of a company's future revenues will come from 20 percent of existing customers.

The software's newest features include:

Sponsor Tracking. Thishelps mitigate against a key cause of customer churn, an executive sponsor’s departure. Gainsight automatically detects contacts listed in the client’s CRM system and monitors for role changes in LinkedIn or InsideView. Customer360 views are further augmented with external news, events and CRM intelligence from InsideView.

Gainsight Home. Gainsight Home provides a personalized and actionable window for each role across the enterprise that touches CRM, enabling effective collaboration. Every relevant stakeholder, including executives, sales, marketing and support, gets relevant data and workflow views.

Enterprise Permissions. This feature adds another layer of control on top of existing CRM permissions that Gainsight preserves. Administrators can define additional granular privileges for CRM stakeholders to view customer and company data, modify blended data reports, or use certain functionalities (such as surveys) within the Gainsight solution.

"From our account managers to marketing directors to executives, our team looks to Gainsight for complete visibility into our customer base," said Amanda Schmidt, vice president Client Success at Gainsight client Adobe Echosign. "Gainsight drives enterprise collaboration for the purpose of not just keeping, but delighting customers."

New Hires

Gainsight also announced two key hires: Ramani and Chief Data Scientist Sherif Botros.

Ramani will focus on enhancing Gainsight’s analytics and data discovery capabilities so enterprises can analyze their data to gets answers to questions they didn’t know they had. Previously she worked on data-driven small business retention at Facebook. Prior to Facebook, she held product management and engineering roles at Intuit. Botros will lead the company’s data science practice to help clients predict the factors of growth and churn based on historical data and prescribe efective actions based on the data. Most recently, he served as the director of Analytics at SAP Labs, where he led the Data Science practice.